Session 61 -
October 23, 2016
San’Kari gave the wheel in the center of the icy
chamber four turns, until it stopped and he thought he heard something click into
place. An opening was revealed across the room, leading to a descending
staircase, which took them to a long hallway that curved off to their left. In
the center of the passage at the point where it turned stood a chunk of amber
as large as a man. Landon checked the passageway for traps. As Silverleaf
scanned the walls, he noticed faint sigils that he interpreted as the signs of
those warriors who had fought alongside Armag at his most famed battle. Landon
noticed that the amber stone had begun to vibrate slightly. He went closer to
examine it. Within the amber he could make out various inclusions. He realized
that there was some type of interplanar trap in the hallway. Then webs began to
form beyond the amber. From the darkness appeared an enormous spider, which
Landon realized was a demonic creature from another plane of existence.
San’kari immediately went forward to attack the
spider; though its webbing filled the corridor and the strands were as thick as
ropes, San’kari’s magic ring allowed him to move freely. Silverleaf moved up
behind Landon and gave him the strength of a bull but could move no further when
the webbing surrounded him, though it didn’t complete fill the space in which
he stood. San’kari and Landon both struck at the spider, which extruded further
web and entangled Landon. Silverleaf then summoned an ally and a warrior made
of force appeared behind the spider, flanking with San'kari. The spider bit
Landon, but he was fortunately immune to its poison. Silverleaf expended a
charge from his staff and filled the passage with flames, burning away the webs
but also burning Landon and San’kari. Then San’kari chopped the spider with his
axe, and it died. With the webbing cleared, Landon eagerly examined the creature
before its corpse vanished back to the plane from which it had come.
Silverleaf channeled the healing power of the
gods to make amends for setting his comrades on fire before they moved on to
the end of the passage. It led them into a circular room occupied by four large
pillars supporting a domed ceiling reaching some fifty feet above them. In the
center of the pillars stood a very large figure covered in spiky armor. Landon
identified this figure as a golem. On three sides of the chamber were massive
double doors, including the entrance through which the party had arrived. The
fourth side had no doors, but oddly it appeared that someone had attempted to
chip away at the stone there. The wall was scarred where it had been attacked
with axes or swords.
Avoiding the center area where the golem stood,
Landon skirted around the room checking for traps, while, Silverleaf examined
the area for magic. He detected that some of the sigils on the pillars were
magical, and there was an aura of magic on the damaged wall but he couldn’t
make out what it was. Landon found that the other two doors were locked. He
approached the door-less wall and consumed an elixir to allow him to see secret
doors, hoping to find one hidden behind the stone.
Behind the rock Landon saw a mirror, and caught
a brief glimpse of a Black Sister. He also felt a chill. After Landon described
this to the others, San’kari used one of his magic rings to shape the stone
away from the hidden door. The doorway that was revealed proved possible to
open only from the opposite side. Silverleaf attempted to identify what manner
of magical door it was, but was unable to acquire any more information. Landon
then spent a short time creating another elixir to enable him to learn more.
The door seemed to lead to a portal, which might have been placed there by the
Black Sisters or was being utilized by them. San’kari wondered if freeing the
doorway from its stone surroundings entirely would allow the group to remove
the door or open it, but Landon’s examination indicated this wouldn’t be
successful.
After spending some time trying to understand
the portal, the group members decided to continue looking for Armag’s sword.
When Landon approached the double doors to the right of the portal, the golem
suddenly awoke and warned them that it did not want to have to attack them. The
party then began to question the golem, as it seemed willing enough to respond
to their inquiries and made no move to threaten them.
In response to their questions, the golem told
them that it had been placed there by Armag himself to protect the tomb, and
that it couldn’t move beyond the area encircled by the four pillars. It
believed that the doors Landon had been trying to unlock might lead to the
tomb, but it didn’t know that with certainty. The portal had been placed there
by the Black Sisters and had been there for a year or more, though it admitted
that it lacked a good sense of the passage of time. It claimed that the others
doors led to a cavern occupied by an imprisoned dragon. The golem also told the
group that to get through the door that led toward the tomb could only be
opened with the ‘amber key’, which was held by one of Armag’s descendents who
was the baron of Fort Drelev.
This particular piece of information really
aroused the interest of the party from New Hope, as they understood Fort Drelev
to have fallen under the influence of the Black Sisters. If the Sisters had
control of the current baron, why had they not already acquired the key and
entered the tomb to claim the sword? The party members speculated that perhaps
the current baron was keeping the location of the key hidden, or possibly wasn’t
aware that the key existed and didn’t know where it was stored.
The golem also warned the group that if they
tried to open the doors without the key, the mirror portal would attack them.
They concluded that any further examination of the golem’s chamber was not
useful at this time, and they decided to go on through the door to the south.
This actually led to a passageway that split. The direction they chose didn’t
lead them to the dragon, but instead to a thirty-foot precipice with another
passage on the opposite side of the cavern it led to. At the bottom of the
cliff was a lot of rubbish, and Silverleaf and Tahjah sensed magic items in the
trash. Landon descended to the floor of the cave to examine the rubbish. He
found the bones of many humanoid creatures, and determined that the leg bones
had been cut by something jagged like the teeth of a bear trap. Among the
remains Landon found a set of hide armor, a spear, and three oblong obsidian
stones that were all magical. He gathered these things up and took them back up
to the top of the cliff.
When examined further, the three stones proved
especially interesting. They were capable of opening a door between dimensions
that would allow a person to travel a short distance without covering the
intervening space, and if left in place the person could use this doorway to
return to the starting point as long as the magic wasn’t deactivated and the
stone wasn’t moved. But both Landon and Silverleaf sensed that there was more
to the stones than just this capability. Landon, Silverleaf, and Tahjah each took
possession of a stone.
After they had examined the items Landon found,
the whole group descended to the floor of the cavern and went through the
opening there, which took them back to the area they had already explored. They
returned to the golem chamber and talked to it further, asking why the dragon
had been imprisoned there if it didn’t appear to guard anything. During this
conversation, Landon recalled that Armag had reputedly had a dragon mount. The
golem confirmed this, and added that the dragon had been transformed into a
worg and sent out into the world. This remark excited the heroes, as their
friend Grizz the worg had proved to be a very old brass dragon who had somehow
been transformed into a worg against his will.
Once the discussion had got past the dragon, the
golem also revealed that it knew the Black Sisters had made an attack on New
Hope three days earlier, though the four Sisters leading the attack had failed
to penetrate the fort’s defenses. It also revealed that the leader of the Black
Sisterhood was known as Lady Fornus, a priestess of Gyrona whose preferred
domain was darkness.
After learning all of this information, the
heroes decided it was time to leave the tomb and consider whether to go to Fort
Drelev for the key next or return to New Hope to check on the citizens there.
They departed from the caverns by the same route through which they had
entered. Once they were outside, the barbarians encamped there gave them no
trouble. In fact, when asked if they would like to be freed of the Black
Sisterhood, they confessed that they were all cowards. The group members
encouraged the barbarians to leave this area and go to Oleg’s Fort, even going
so far as to give them a letter of introduction to present to Oleg. The barbarians
were very disappointed that the heroes would not send their two militiamen
along with them as protection.
To protect themselves from any Black Sisters
still in the caves, the party moved to a point about an hour’s ride away from
the tomb to set up camp. After they had made camp, Landon sent his
consciousness to one of his simulacra in New Hope to find out what had happened
there. He learned that Munguk the giant had taken the lead in combating the
attacking Black Sisters, and had also slain one of the chimeras the Sisters had
brought with them. Because he knew that Landon liked such things, he had kept
the chimera’s carcass, and a priestess who had been at the fort had preserved
it so Landon could dissect it. Munguk described that the archers had used fire
arrows against the Sisters and had found them to be vulnerable to fire, as most
of their robes burnt up instantly when set ablaze. Three of the four Sisters
had also been slain, but their bodies had dissolved into a slimy substance upon
their deaths.
After learning about what had occurred during
the attack, Landon acquired a number of magic items that had been found among
the Black Sisters remains, including a belt, a rod, a cloak, and several
potions.
While Landon was away the others rested and
stood watch over his unconscious body. Silverleaf expended a spell to replace a
charge in his staff, then spent time examining his obsidian stone, trying to
learn more about its properties. He experienced a vision of a scene of battle
in which the sky was dark with arrows and Black Sister pursued giants using an
animated trap like the one that had severed the legs of the remains in the
cavern. He also saw a mask-wearing skull with glowing green eyes, which he
somehow knew was some type of guardian. Though there was nothing in the vision
to tell him when it had taken place, he felt that it was a vision of the past.
Landon returned the next morning and told them
what had happened at New Hope. He had also learned that there had been centaurs
there, though he didn’t know why they had traveled all the way from the other
side of the mountains. Fey in the forest had seen the Black Sisters and their
forces coming from the northwest, which the heroes knew to be the direction in
which an old cemetery lay. They knew they would eventually have to visit the
cemetery and perhaps consecrate it to prevent the forces of evil from utilizing
it.
After Landon told his story, Silverleaf advised
him that he should examine his stone. When Landon did this, he witnessed a
vision of giants being consumed by fire. When they died and were burned, a
black figure knelt by the remains and put something into their mouths, after
which they arose as zombies and followed the figure obediently. The figure was
some type of astral projection of evil, though Landon knew it was female and
was probably a Black Sister. Like Silverleaf, Landon knew that this was a
vision of a past event.
Tahjah then decided that she, too, should look
into her stone. Her vision was quite different: she saw a magical quill
inscribing spells in a spellbook without aid of a living creature, while a
small cloud of fog seemed to rain acid on the pages. Beyond the spell-scribing
quill she saw many scrolls, which were slowly being rolled on dowels by a
lint-coated imp. Her impression was that this had taken place recently.
Landon began to wonder if the three stones could
somehow be combined to do something more. He experimented with assembling them
like a menhir and discovered that two of the stones would stand on end by
themselves. Once he placed the third stone on top, the stones suddenly enlarged
to eight feet in height and through the space between the uprights could be
seen an expanse of blue sky. The witnesses felt a strong wind blowing from this
place. As they tried to determine if this might be a portal to another plane,
four riders in red and silver bearing the flag of Brevoy went past, followed by
several nightmares and two nuckelavee. A short time later they saw the same
riders and pursuers race past again, and again.
Silverleaf recalled tales of traps made to
teleport the victims back to their starting point over and over. It seemed that
this strange portal was allowing them to witness such a trap. Tahjah wondered
if she could use telekinetic magic to pull the riders through the portal. On
her first attempt she was able to thrust one rider off her horse from the
opposite direction, so that the elven woman flew out of the portal into the
camp. Heartened by her success, Tahjah was able to push the other three riders
out as well, though her spell was not strong enough to free their horses. San’kari
caught the three additional riders so that they had a less painful landing than
the first.
The party members gave the four rescued people
food and water and Tahjah channeled divine energy to heal their hurts. When
questioned about what had happened to them, the four people told a strange and
disturbing tale, though they told it in fits and starts and seemed bewildered
by many of the questions they were asked. It seemed that they had been offered
50 gold pieces by Lord Terrion Numeste of Brevoy to go to Armag’s tomb and
explore it. They had not been equipped with any weapons or armor, and all of
them were tradespeople or merchants, not experienced adventurers. One was a
merchant, one a scribe, one a cartographer, and one a trapper. Eventually
Silverleaf began to suspect that they were too foolish and naïve for it to be
natural and he examined them to see if perhaps they had been subjected to an
effect similar to what the daemon had done to Landon and Kara. But he
discovered instead that all of them had scars on their temples. The four people
explained that after they had volunteered for this mission they had been sent
to Lord Terrion’s mage to be ‘mentally prepared’ for the task. The party
members realized that this ‘preparation’ must have involved removing a portion
of their brains. They began to suspect that the Black Sisters were spreading
their influence in Brevoy, though they didn’t know if Lord Terrion was a
willing participant or had been duped.
Further discussion with the four poor victims
led them to learn that Lord Terrion apparently knew quite a lot about the traps
in Armag's tomb, and had sent numerous groups of similar people there to explore
over the past year or two. These people had first gone to the wrong place,
accidentally entering a bear’s lair, and had then been paralyzed by a Black
Sister and pushed into the teleportation trap. They hadn’t had horses with them
at the time and hadn’t even been aware that they were riding, or being chased. Somehow
Lord Terrion, or the Black Sisters advising him, had realized that some of the
traps within the tomb would not endanger someone of little intellectual
capacity, so they had sent in explorers who didn’t have enough intellect to
trigger these traps or draw the attention of the creatures within. The four
people had met the black dragon trapped there, but it had declined to bother
them. They described the dragon, the ice-covered chain holding it, and even
knew its name: Ilthuliak. The heroes realized that his name sounded very much
like the name of the black dragon they had met near Lake Silverstep, and in
fact Ilthuliak had told the four explorers from Brevoy that he had a twin.
San’kari suggested they use one of their
teleportation devices to visit Ilthuliak’s twin at Lake Silverstep and tell him
where to find his brother, but nothing they had in their possession could transport
a person so far. Only Garrick’s magic boots could do it, and Garrick had left
the party temporarily. Then Silverleaf suggested that he send a magical message
to the dragon. With the agreement of the others, he carefully composed the
short missive and transmitted it to Ilthuliak’s twin: ‘From Garrick of Galisat:
Ilthuliak imprisoned in Armag’s tomb near Hooktongue Slough by waterfall, we’re
nearby will help if you wish.’
Loot:
+3 hide armor
+3 anarchic
spear
3 dimension
stones
Cloak of resistance
+2
Belt of physical
might +4 str, +4 con
+2 defending
longsword
Ring of keys
Rod of splendor
+3 breastplate
Potion of cure
light wounds
Potion of haste
Potion of levitation
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